Society is not ready to abandon the library, and it probably won’t ever be. Libraries can adapt to social and technological changes, but they can’t be replaced. While libraries are distinct from the internet, librarians are the most suited professionals to guide scholars and citizens toward a better understanding of how to find valuable information online.

My latest Ariadne Column is now out and available. I've done a round up of New Search Engines in 2006 in an A-Z format with a quick one line assessment. It's a total of 22 engines, which rather demonstrates that the field, crowded though it is, isn't stopping new people coming in.

midomi. is a search engine that you can use to search for music by humming it via your microphone to the search engine and it then turns up results for you. So I tried with 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road', and it wasn't in the top 30 results. 'Twist and Shout' - not in the top 30 results. Well, maybe it's just my voice. As I was playing a Beatles album at the time I tried this I thought maybe they can do better, so tried it with 'Love me Do'. Not in the top 30 results, although Julie Andrews and 'Wouldn't it be loverly' came in at 9th position. I think I'll give it a miss to be honest.

Google has artificially played around with the search for miserable failure which used to link directly to the US President's biography. Now it leads to a BBC article about the Google bomb. They've also done the same with 'liar' which no longer points towards information on the British Prime Minister either. The New York Times has an interesting article on this. Google claim that by better understanding their analysis of the link structure of the Web searches would instead result in links to commentary, discussions and articles about the tactic.

Well, I can understand why Google has done this, but I'm not sure that it's a clever idea. It now opens them up to criticism whenever any Google bomb continues to work - they haven't changed the 'french military victories' result for example, which pokes fun at the French. One could therefore argue that Google isn't happy with fun being poked at the US President, but they're fine and ok with it happening to the entire French nation. Then there's the Martin Luther King racist site as well, which is in the position it's in (currently 6th) because of links, rather than being there on its own merit. Is Google ok with that? One could assume that they are, since they've done nothing about it.

One could of course argue that any set of results is going to be artificial, since they're based on some algorithm or the other, and that's true. However, you either go with the formula that you've got and live with the results, or change the formula surely? By going around and tweaking results by hand is surely demonstrating that you don't actually quite know what you're doing. (Edited to add that, having read more about it, which is always a good idea, they're not tweaking by hand per se, although they're still fiddling around with the algo to achieve a specific result, which is a bit like having a theory and choosing facts that support it) It's not that much of a push to go to the stage of saying that Google is censoring itself (which isn't of course anything new). What it does do is given even more credence to the fact that you can't trust a search engine - any of them!

January 24, 2007

ResourceShelf : Pageflakes. Quick review of Pageflakes over at ResourceShelf. They rather like it as well. And despite my grumblings in the past I'm still using it because I still think it's the best one of its type out there. They have made some new additions, such as really nice scrolling tabs which make the whole thing that little bit smoother. I agree with what ResourceShelf says about the product, but one important point that they've not really highlighted is the fact that you can share tabs with colleagues, friends and family, which makes it an extraordinarily powerful collaboration tool.

I've demonstrated Pageflakes to several groups of people now, both librarians and corporate people and that's the key 'selling' point with it.

Very funny short video clip here. The search engine expert (don't know who she is) is demonstrating Ms Dewey to a television show host. They type in his name and she comes out with one of her sarcastic little comments prior to showing the results. Host Gets Owned By Search Engine - emuse.ebaumsworld.com.

January 21, 2007

Link: The ad generator. "Words and semantic structures from
real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans.
These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating
fake advertisements on the fly." This is worth spending some time looking at, since it sometimes gets some fantastic words/images together. They do race by though, so if you want something, be ready to try and grab it there and then - I'm not sure if you'll ever see it again.